The EU promotes fiscal and regulatory competition and mobility of people, companies, and capital since many years. But as soon as there's true competition, the bigger ones (with plenty of wasteful spending) don't work on themselves but bully the smaller competitors into compliance.

The reason EU cracked down on Ireland is because it offered special deals where Microsoft and other select multinationals got to pay lower corporate tax rate than other companies incorporated in Ireland.

Ireland is being pressured by EU regulators because offering lower tax for only certain companies is a form of _state subsidy_ that results in _market distortion_.

Ikea, the Swedish company that is a pioneer in now-common aggressive profit shifting practices, is not being pursued by EU since it doesn't have a special deal with the Netherlands (where Ikea has a paper company that gets all of its profit shovelled into) where it gets to pay lower corporate tax than other companies incorporated in the Netherlands.

Fascinating theory regarding the ice, however, regarding the formation:

"According to the idea, the solar system had its origin in a gigantic star into which a smaller, dead, waterlogged star fell. This impact caused a huge explosion which flung fragments of the smaller star out into interstellar space where the water condensed and froze into giant blocks of ice. A ring of such blocks formed, which we now call the Milky Way, as well as a number of solar systems among which was our own, but with many more planets than currently exist."

maybe too far fetched? If it was like that we would have already spotted similar galactic formations outside of the Milky Way